Dear Hunters' Greens CSA Members,

Yesterday's shares should have included 20 stems of kale, 8 "sprouting" garlics, 6 carrots, a half pound broccoli (Vancouver shares) or a medium and some small lettuces (farm shares), 11 mustard green leaves.

SPROUTING GARLIC.  Not all the garlic plants were so "sprouty" this week, so if you aren't like us and eat seven bulbs of garlic a week, you may want to hang some of the less "sprouty" ones up by their stems to dry for later use.

A CSA PRIMER, PART II.  The longer we work as farmers, the more we assume that everyone knows how produce farming works, but then someone comes along and reminds us that there is no reason that would be true.

Let's start with some major misconceptions we often run into.  A lot of folks seem to think that all farmers are up at the crack of dawn.  At a latitude where dawn can be anywhere from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m., it is sometimes going to be true, but certainly not always.  We think this misconception must come from the olden days when many farmers were dairy farmers, and the cows had to be milked, morning and evening (generally twelve hours apart).  If you didn't want to be milking at ten in the evening, then you had to get started on the morning milking pretty early.

But alas, most dairy farming is now done on large specialized operations, where shifts of workers may milk around the clock and some cows are milked three times a day.  And that means for most of us farm folk we can sleep to a reasonable hour.  Occasionally in the dead of the summer heat, Jim will rise pretty early, but he compensates by heading to the cool basement for a nap in the heat of the afternoon.  Diane, not so much, considers 9 a.m. as a decent hour.

The flip side of the up early misconception is the one that thinks that we plant all our crops in the spring and then just sit around and wait for them to mature in the summer and fall.  While, this may be true (we really don't know) of a few very specialized single crop farmers, for diversified CSA produce farmers, growing dozens of different crops and varieties, planting can begin the previous fall (for garlic and over-wintering onions), pick up again in February, and continue on until September.  The real planting crunch time for us comes whenever the fields dry out, and the temperature warms up to plant the sun loving crops.  At this time, usually about the first of July, we are still catching up on the spring greens type crops, hurrying to get in the tomatoes ands squashes, and finding ourselves falling behind in planting the fall and winter greens and root crops.  Some time in August it starts to ease up a little.

The other factor that keeps us planting week in and week out is something called crop succession.  As home gardeners may have learned, if you want lettuce all summer, you have to plant all summer.  Otherwise you get lettuce for a few weeks, then it puts up a flower stalk and gets bitter, and you are without lettuce for the rest of the summer.  Barring some catastrophe we plan to keep the lettuce coming all summer.  Other crops won't stand the heat and long days at all, so we plant some in the spring, and some in the late summer, for fall harvesting.  Radishes are an example.

On the ideal CSA farm, various kinds of work are spread around the calendar, so that no time becomes overwhelmingly busy.  This is why the enterprising CSA farmer will be busy marketing her shares in the dead of winter when there is not a lot of crop work to do.  Also, she won't have produce to sell for months to come, and yet she still has to do the farm work to get ready for the coming season.  Early share sales can provide a much needed cash flow equalizer.

So that's a little more about what life for CSA farmers is REALLY like.

Until next week, Bon Appetit!